Amygdala is a key brain region for face perception. While the role of amygdala in the perception of facial emotion and gaze has been extensively highlighted with fMRI, the unfolding in time of ...amydgala responses to emotional versus neutral faces with different gaze directions is scarcely known.
Here we addressed this question in healthy subjects using MEG combined with an original source imaging method based on individual amygdala volume segmentation and the localization of sources in the amygdala volume. We found an early peak of amygdala activity that was enhanced for fearful relative to neutral faces between 130 and 170 ms. The effect of emotion was again significant in a later time range (310-350 ms). Moreover, the amygdala response was greater for direct relative averted gaze between 190 and 350 ms, and this effect was selective of fearful faces in the right amygdala.
Altogether, our results show that the amygdala is involved in the processing and integration of emotion and gaze cues from faces in different time ranges, thus underlining its role in multiple stages of face perception.
Background:
Deficit in social communication is a core feature in Autism Spectrum Disorder but remains poorly assessed in classical clinical practice, especially in adult populations. This gap between ...needs and practice is partly due to a lack of standardized evaluation tools. The multicentric Research group in psychiatry GDR3557 (Institut de Psychiatrie) developed a new battery for social cognitive evaluation named “ClaCoS,” which allows testing the main components of social cognition: Emotion Recognition, Theory of Mind, Attributional Style, and Social Perception and Knowledge. It further provides an assessment of subjective complaints in social cognition.
Methods:
We compared the social cognition abilities of 45 adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder without intellectual disability and 45 neurotypically developed volunteers using the “ClaCoS” battery, in order to determine its relevance in the evaluation of social cognition impairments in autism. A correlational approach allowed us to test the links between subjective complaints and objectively measured impairments for the different components of social cognition.
Results:
As expected, the Autism Spectrum Disorder group showed deficits in all four components of social cognition. Moreover, they reported greater subjective complaints than controls regarding their social abilities, correlated to the neuropsychological assessments.
Conclusion:
The “ClaCoS” battery is an interesting tool allowing to assess social impairments in autism and to specify the altered components, for a better adjustment of tailored social cognition training programs. Our results further suggest that people with Autism Spectrum Disorder have a good social cognitive insight, i.e., awareness into social cognitive functioning, and may thus benefit from social cognitive training tools.
Social cognition refers to the mental operations underlying social interactions. Given the major role of social cognitive deficits in the disability associated with severe psychiatric disorders, they ...therefore constitute a crucial therapeutic target. However, no easily understandable and transnosographic self-assessment scale evaluating the perceived difficulties is available. This study aimed to analyze the psychometric qualities of a new self-administered questionnaire (ACSo) assessing subjective complaints in different domains of social cognition from 89 patients with schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorders, bipolar disorders or autism. The results revealed satisfactory internal validity and test-retest properties allowing the computation of a total score along with four sub scores (attributional biases, social perception and knowledge, emotional perception and theory of mind). Moreover, the ACSo total score was correlated with other subjective assessments traditionally used in cognitive remediation practice but not with objective neuropsychological assessments of social cognition. In summary, the ACSo is of interest to complete the objective evaluation of social cognition processes with a subjective assessment adapted to people with serious mental illness or autism spectrum disorder.
Recent electrophysiological studies have demonstrated modulations of the very first stages of visual processing (<100ms) due to prior experience. This indicates an influence of a memory trace on the ...earliest stages of stimulus processing. Here we investigated if emotional audio-verbal information associated with faces on first encounter can affect the very early responses to those faces on subsequent exposure. We recorded magneto-encephalographic (MEG) responses to neutral faces that had been previously associated with positive (happy), negative (angry) or neutral auditory verbal emotional contexts. Our results revealed a very early (30–60ms) difference in the brain responses to the neutral faces according to the type of previously associated emotional context, with a clear dissociation between the faces previously associated to positive vs. negative or neutral contexts. Source localization showed that two main regions were involved in this very early association effect: the bilateral ventral occipito-temporal regions and the right anterior medial temporal region. These results provide evidence that the memory trace of a face integrates positive emotional cues present in the context of prior encounter and that this emotional memory can influence the very first stages of face processing. These experimental findings support the idea that face perception can be shaped by experience from its earliest stages and in particular through emotional association effects.
► The memory trace of neutral faces integrates emotional contextual information. ► This emotional memory trace affects face processing as early as between 30 and 60ms. ► Occipito-temporal and anterior medial temporal regions subtend this early effect. ► Thus face perception is shaped by the emotional context of a single prior encounter.
•We examined if trait anxiety may affect early stages of emotional face processing.•We tested emotional modulation of the P1, N170 and EPN using happy and fearful vs. neutral faces.•The occipital P1 ...was greater for happy vs. neutral faces, only in high anxious subjects.•The N170 and EPN were modulated by fearful vs. neutral faces in high and low trait anxious subjects.•Our results underline an early bias towards positive stimuli in trait anxiety.
The present study examined the influence of trait anxiety on the early stages of emotional face processing. In order to test if such early effect of anxiety could appear in response to positive as well as to negative stimuli, we recorded event-related potentials in response to both happy and fearful faces – contrasted with neutral faces – during a task where attention was explicitly directed to the emotion, in two groups differing by their anxiety level. We observed an amplification of the occipital P1 peak (90–120ms) in response to happy compared to neutral faces in high trait anxious participants but not in the low trait anxious ones. Additionally, the N170 and EPN components were enhanced for the negative (fearful) faces, with no impact of trait anxiety. Our results provide evidence for an early bias towards positive stimuli in trait anxiety.
The main goal of this study was to explore the organizational strategies used by younger and older adults when encoding words, using eye-tracking. Participants had to learn a set of organizable words ...and then a set of non-organizable words, each presented on a single display. Participants were then asked to recall the words of each set in the order in which they came to their mind. Hence, the participants' encoding strategies revealed by eye-tracking could be directly related to their subsequent memory performance. The results confirmed the detrimental impact of aging on memory and the weaker use of organizational strategies by older adults during the recall phase. The eye-tracking data showed that when they encode the words, older adults do not look at them for as long as younger adults, probably because of slower eye movements. They also revealed that compared to younger adults, older adults were much less able to adapt their word scanning strategy according to whether the words to encode were organizable or not. Finally, the relationships that were found between the recall scores and the eye-tracking data suggest that the eye movement pattern at learning can predict how people will recall the words.
Abstract To determine how emotional information modulates subsequent traces for repeated stimuli, we combined simultaneous electro-encephalography (EEG) and magneto-encephalography (MEG) measures ...during long-lag incidental repetition of fearful, happy, and neutral faces. Repetition effects were modulated by facial expression in three different time windows, starting as early as 40–50 ms in both EEG and MEG, then arising at the time of the N170/M170, and finally between 280–320 ms in MEG only. The very early repetition effect, observed at 40–50 ms over occipito-temporo-parietal regions, showed a different MEG topography according to the facial expression. This differential response to fearful, happy and neutral faces suggests the existence of very early discriminative visual processing of expressive faces, possibly based on the low-level physical features typical of different emotions. The N170 and M170 face-selective components both showed repetition enhancement selective to neutral faces, with greater amplitude for emotional than neutral faces on the first but not the second presentation. These differential repetition effects may reflect valence acquisition for the neutral faces due to repetition, and suggest a combined influence of emotion- and experience-related factors on the early stage of face encoding. Finally, later repetition effects consisted in enhanced M300 (MEG) between 280 and 320 ms for fearful relative to happy and neutral faces that occurred on the first presentation, but levelled out on the second presentation. This effect may correspond to the higher arousing value of fearful stimuli that might habituate with repetition. Our results reveal that multiple stages of face processing are affected by the repetition of emotional information.
Abstract Schizophrenia is associated with severe episodic retrieval impairment. The aim of this study was to investigate the possibility that schizophrenia patients could improve their familiarity ...and/or recollection processes by manipulating the semantic coherence of to-be-learned stimuli and using deep encoding. Twelve schizophrenia patients and 12 healthy controls of comparable age, gender, and educational level undertook an associative recognition memory task. The stimuli consisted of pairs of words that were either related or unrelated to a given semantic category. The process dissociation procedure was used to calculate the estimates of familiarity and recollection processes. Both groups showed enhanced memory performances for semantically related words. However, in healthy controls, semantic relatedness led to enhanced recollection, while in schizophrenia patients, it induced enhanced familiarity. The familiarity estimates for related words were comparable in both groups, indicating that familiarity could be used as a compensatory mechanism in schizophrenia patients.
Waves of activity following a focal stimulation are reliably observed to spread across the cortical tissue. The origin of these waves remains unclear and the underlying mechanisms and function are ...still debated. In this study, we ask whether waves of activity modulate the magnetoencephalography (MEG) signals recorded in humans during visual stimulation with Gabor patches sequentially flashed along a vertical path, eliciting a perception of vertical apparent motion. Building upon the functional properties of long-rang horizontal connections, proposed to contribute to spreading activity, we specifically probe the amplitude and latency of MEG responses as a function of Gabor contrast and orientation. The results indicate that in the left hemisphere the response amplitude is enhanced and the half height response latency is shortened for co-aligned Gabor as compared to misaligned Gabor patches at a low but not at a high contrast. Building upon these findings, we develop a biologically plausible computational model that performs a "spike time alignment" of the responses to elongated contours with varying contrast, endowing them with a phase advance relative to misaligned contours.
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